Saturday, May 31, 2014

Aricle on ptss

Strategypage.
The army and marines are dealing with PTSD head on, believing that what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, will happen again, and now is the time to get ready. Experience so far has shown that PTSD can be delayed, perhaps for a long time. When a soldier does come down with it, PTSD can often be treated, and its effects reversed. But not always. This has large ramifications for non-military medicine, for many civilians suffer from PTSD. That's because military recruits are screened for their ability to handle stress and resist PTSD. In the civilian community, there are far more people who can acquire PTSD after exposure to much less stress. What many troops wish the brass would understand is that, as recruits, they learned that stress was a major part of the job, and understood it more than the mental health mafia is willing to admit.
 


For later reading.

Friday, May 30, 2014

NANOPARTICLE DANGER?

MomJones article on nanoparticles, which have been introduced into a lot of stuff without checking if they can cause problems.

of course, if you read scandal sheets like the UKMail, you would already know about the potential problems LINK


A particular worry is the use of carbon nanoparticles in items including clothing, car tyres and tennis racquets. Laboratory tests found that they exhibited similar properties to asbestos fibres.
Concerns were also raised over nano silver, used in sports clothing to kill the bacteria which produce odours.  Tests found that this substance, which is released into the environment when clothes are washed, is more toxic than bleach.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1084931/Revealed-The-toxic-nanoparticles-asbestos-like-properties-everyday-goods.html#ixzz33FhyptTf
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook


more HERE

bad science study of the day

Anti psychotic medicines increase diabetes in pregnancy.

Well, actually most older antipsychotics result in obesity (either by increasing appetite or by slowing down movement because they induce mild parkinsonian side effects and slow the general thinking/acting/moving of the patient).


so fatter, less active women tend to have more diabetes in pregnancy...

and psychotic/schizophrenic patients are more prone to using cigarettes and eating bad diets...

I see fat people

LATimes laments 2.1 billion people are fat.

blame modern agriculture, the green revolution, and of course, the fact that modern capitalism spreads wealth.


Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Trying to stop the psychotic

the latest shooting of elites by an elite isn't quite fitting the meme.

He warned folks, but the cops thought he was "nice" when they interviewed him, so let him go.

He is "autistic" so no one noticed when his thoughts turned psychotic (Makes me wonder if many "high functioning" autistics were previously diagnosed as "simple schizophrenia" or "childhood schizophrenia". His thought are not logical but psychotic, but no one noticed because he was autistic...yet the concrete thinking of autism is seen in schizophrenia, but not the delusional thinking, which in this case seemed right out of Ted Kazinscki (SP?).

He was a virgin: what, no hookers nearby?

He hated. Again, not autistic, since most autistics don't notice other people and don't really care.

He was Indoy America: Half asian, but the meme is that he was "white".

He was in a halfway house...again, no one monitored him?

He bought a gun even though he was in a halfway house? Again, no one monitored this?

The crime will be used to hit gun control, even though he stabbed three of the seven victims.

The crime will be used to stigmatize sexism, even though four of his seven victims were men.
But the main problem is that people want "tolerance" so refuse to recognize psychosis as a disease, not reality.

he might have had autism but his diagnosis here was paranoid schizophrenia.


Who needs death panels when the doctor will do it for you?

NotDeadYet discusses when docs try to override caretaker's wishes to give ORDINARY treatment to the disabled.

dvocacy Network, Not Dead Yet, and 12 other disability rights organizations filed an amicus brief in a case challenging the University of Wisconsin Hospital Center’s alleged practice of counseling families of people with developmental disabilities to withhold care for treatable but potentially life-threatening medical conditions, such as pneumonia. (Disability Rights Wisconsin v. University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, et al., Case No. 2014 AP 135, Wisconsin Court of Appeals, District IV.)
According to the amended complaint (Disability Rights Wisconsin v. University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, et al., Case No 09-CV-2340, filed January 8, 2010, Wis. Circuit Court of Dane County), one thirteen-year-old child died of pneumonia and one adult was denied care after University of Wisconsin Hospital physicians advised families to withdraw antibiotics, nutrition, and hydration. When the child’s regular caregivers objected to withdrawing treatment, UWHC physicians allegedly encouraged the family to have him transferred to the University of Wisconsin Hospital, where he was taken off of antibiotics, nutrition, and hydration, and transferred to hospice care. He died the next day.
In both cases, Disability Rights Wisconsin claimed, doctors allegedly based their determinations on their patients’ supposedly low quality of life as individuals with disabilities, and acted without the approval of the hospital ethics committee.

of course, a lot of those "ethics committe" stuff is sham too, but that's another story.

Rabies

BBC article on Rabies. for later reading.

Here, if a kid is bitten it costs about 40 dollars to get the shots. I got a set after one of our dogs unvaccinated bit me.

we hadn't vaccinated him because he was 8 months old, and we had given him away but he kept running back here (meaning he was exposed to feral dogs) and then three months later died, probably of pneumonia.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

MERS in the US: DUH

so one of the Americans who treated MERS patients in Saudi got flu like symptoms and sat in the ER for 8 hours before admitted.

And NOW they will be screening at airports, as they have been doing for over a week here since a suspected case arrived here back then.

Doesn't look like they learned anything from SARS

Monday, May 12, 2014

Death panels? Massachusetts haz them

Via Wesley Smith's page:

According to a medical study, since 2006, Massachusetts General Hospital’s Bioethics Committee has forced people to not receive wanted resuscitation by imposing unilateral DNRs. And apparently, it’s all done in Star Chamber secrecy. From Thaddeus Pope’s blog (quoting from a medical symposium presentation):
If I read this correctly, thirty-eight percent of those upon whom the unilateral DNRs appear not to have been at the end stage of a terminal disease:
Patients for whom unilateral DNR was recommended were more likely to have conditions judged to be endstage rather than potentially reversible (62% versus 41%, p=0.05).
Unilateral Do-Not-Resuscitate (DNR) orders are a specific type of medical futility decision in which clinicians withhold advanced cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in the event of cardiopulmonary arrest despite objections of patients or their surrogates. There is little information on how often and to whom unilateral DNR orders are applied. The ethics committee at Massachusetts General Hospital has had a unilateral DNR policy since 2006. We investigated the incidence, sociodemographic and clinical predictors, and outcomes of patients with unilateral DNR orders.
And who can be surprised that non whites were more likely to have an involuntary DNR imposed?

HIV in African women

NYTimes discovers schistosomiasis.

theory, pointing out, for example, that urban women raised far from infested water also die of AIDS. But proponents of the theory say that two decades ago, many experts were just as skeptical of the idea that circumcision protected men against H.I.V. It was not until 2006 that three clinical trialsproved it correct.
Schistosomiasis “is arguably the most important cofactor in Africa’s AIDS epidemic,” said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. “And it’s a huge women’s health issue: Everyone has heard of genital mutilation and obstetric fistulas. But mention this, and the headlights just go dim.”

Heh. About time. No one has wondered before?

But then why is the rate lower where men are circumcized?

And what about the Depo Provera link?

And the only one who noticed the use of drying herbs was an article in the Village voice 20 years ago.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Skin cancer

AP article on xeroderma pigmentosa cases in an Amazon village.

I had one case in one of my retarded patients who died of skin cancer at age 27,

and I just read a Dean Koontz book where the hero suffered from it (the subplot was that his mom was a scientist and working on a cure with gene manipulation and ended up making monsters instead).

Thursday, May 1, 2014

a REPORT ON SUPERBUGS

 WIRED reports:

A paper published this week reminded me to take a fresh look at NDM, the “Indian superbug” — actually a gene and enzyme — that got so much attention, including from me, in 2011. (Most of the posts are here.) Quick reminder: NDM surfaced in 2008 in Sweden, then was found in the United Kingdom, then in the United States and then elsewhere in the world. It had several distinctive qualities. It appeared in gut bacteria such as Klebsiella and E. coli, and caused infections when those bacteria escaped the gut and got elsewhere in the body. It rendered those bacteria not-vulnerable to almost all antibiotics, leaving so few drugs to use against it that medical personnel found it truly alarming. And it had strong links to South Asia: The first known patient was an Indian man living in Sweden who had gone home for a visit and been hospitalized; victims found later either had family links to India and Pakistan or had gotten medical care there, as medical tourists or because they were injured while traveling.
so why should a superbug pop up in Pakistan?

No, it's not from overuse of antibiotics for minor infections (most can't afford antibiotics) or antibiotics to cows (not a lot of industrial farming).

Could there be a link with counterfeit medicines?

This is also one reason for resistance to anti malarials.